Deep as the Soul
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM pre-slash, one-shot. Draco knew why he was going into Potter's mind to separate Potter from the shard of the Dark Lord's soul still possessing him: because someone had to do it, and he was the best. But even being the best didn't protect him against what he saw in Potter's head. COMPLETE.


**Title:** Deep as the Soul

 **Disclaimer:** J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

 **Pairing:** Harry/Draco pre-slash

 **Rating:** PG-13

 **Content Notes:** Angst, violence, past minor character death, AU

 **Wordcount:** 3900

 **Summary:** Draco knew why he was going into Potter's mind to separate Potter from the shard of the Dark Lord's soul still possessing him: because someone had to do it, and he was the best. But even being the best didn't protect him against what he saw in Potter's head.

 **Author's Notes:** Another of my July Celebration fics, based on the following request by enamoril: _I would like a story wherein Harry is possessed by the shard of Lord Voldemort's soul, having killed Voldemort without killing himself. And Draco becomes the unwilling Hero, after two years of 'Harry's' villainy by using his considerable talent as a master of legilimency to separate the piece from him. Include angst, Harry's Dursley memories, and aftermath. Love or great friendship at the end._

 **Deep as the Soul**

Draco stepped into the room deep in the bowels of the Ministry, under the Department of Mysteries, and winced at the howls that echoed off the walls. No wonder they had chained Potter here, he thought, as he withdrew small earplugs from the trunk that he always carried with him and slid them in. The walls were the thickest in the Ministry, and no one from the outside could hear in.

He knew what he had to do. But it didn't make this any more pleasant.

Draco strode up to the table that Potter was chained to. He thought it was a table more usually used for experiments by Unspeakables; it had that sort of battered, clawed, runnels-of-blood-in-the-dead-of-night look. And Potter was bound by chains that glowed with runes, and held even when Potter arched his back off the table and screamed as loudly as possible.

Other than Potter, Draco, the table, and the ring of pure gold set into the floor that surrounded the table and hummed with a magical energy that echoed that of the runes on the chains, there was nothing in the room.

Draco sat down his trunk and shook his head. "You've got yourself into a mess this time, Potter," he muttered as he started limbering up. His gaze lingered on the runes, and the way they furiously glowed, and winced.

Potter was powerful in and of himself. With a shard of the Dark Lord's soul possessing him and adding that edge to his magic, it meant only the very strongest precautions were enough to keep him at bay.

Then again, "Potter" had murdered three people and talked himself out of the trials each time before they worked out what was going on, with an actual battle. There was no reason to take their chances, especially with someone who had proven he was skilled at casting the Imperius Curse all on his own, without the Dark Lord's help.

Draco closed his eyes and carefully began to arrange his thoughts. The ones about the trials Potter had been through, and the way he had managed to convince so many people that nothing was wrong for almost two years, were natural, but they couldn't be allowed to crowd the front of Draco's mind and impede his concentration.

So Draco stored his thoughts about the case in boxes, trunks banded with iron for strength, oak for living defense, silver for purity, gold for magic. He filled his mind with them until the pressure began to warp and deform his more normal thoughts, and then he eased back and opened his eyes to look at Potter lying on the table before him.

Potter lunged at him with his head out, his teeth snapping. Draco's hand was nowhere near his teeth, but he started anyway.

Potter laughed, and there was a gleam of red in his eyes.

"Do you think you can stand up to me, little Malfoy?" he whispered, a caressing tone in his voice, which came straight through the earplugs. "Why should you be able to? Your father couldn't, and you're a shadow of what he was in his prime."

With his memories sealed away, all Draco did was raise an eyebrow, the way he liked to think Professor Snape would have done. Then he turned and paced the golden ring in a slow circle, studying the runes on it and the carvings that spelled out various incantations around it. The containment had to be perfect if Draco wasn't to find himself with a physical situation he couldn't handle even as he performed the delicate mental work.

He also needed the confirmation so he wouldn't worry constantly in the back of his mind. Worry, at least for him, corroded Occlumency as fast as tarnish did silver.

Potter went on raving about something or other; Draco frankly wasn't paying attention anymore. At last he finished his circle and accepted that he only needed to begin the work.

He pivoted and caught Potter's eyes in the middle of a taunt. " _Legilimens_ ," he said, the word that bore him into the realm of the mind, into the realm of his work and love.

Potter shouted, but the sound faded as Draco stepped into his mind. The thick, choking darkness around him, he had expected. He set about arranging it as he had arranged his memories in trunks, using the same visualization he always did. Keeping images of a landscape consistent from one mind to the side gave him a better chance of returning with his sanity.

Or as himself.

When the darkness fell back and began to press less heavily against him, Draco stood on a neatly-done gravel path in the middle of a garden. The garden was based on the Malfoy ones as they had been before the war, although they always looked slightly different depending on the content of the memories and trauma Draco was dealing with. But there was still the sturdy holm oak in the center of a patch of short grass, there were the flowerbeds, there was the old dry stone wall which house-elves had labored to raise.

This time, the flowers twisting in the beds were all black and red. Draco watched them idly for a moment, as he prepared his strength to cut through the tangle of dark weeds growing on the path.

Then he stepped nearer and stared. Yes, all the flowers were black and red—except one in each patch.

Those lone flowers were green, with a staring, single golden eye in the middle, resembling no natural flower Draco had ever seen. Once he had imposed his will on a sick mind and encouraged it to form itself into a garden, then usually the flowers would be realistic, as the person's sanity reached towards the flicker of reality Draco offered.

Draco hadn't expected that this time. Possession was different from potions addiction, and insanity induced by war trauma, and so many other things that he dealt with. He had thought he would see only the signs of the Dark Lord's mind.

But the green and gold…

"Potter?" he whispered.

A breeze picked up at once, but it traveled through the garden only brushing against the flowers of green and gold, bobbing them alone. The black and red ones began to nod a second later, but those were clearly imitations of the original motion, not the original themselves.

Draco smiled. He knew how to tell the difference between the Dark Lord's soul and Potter's mind, now. He took up the tools of his trade here, the sharp Legilimency probe that manifested as a knife and the cutting magic that was a scythe.

"I'm going to begin walking now, Potter," he murmured with a faint wink. "Let me know when I'm getting close to a memory that's yours alone."

The green and gold flowers once again bobbed in response. The red and black ones were too slow to mimic them this time, and Draco began stalking down the paths, ready to aim his face in a new direction at a moment's notice.

Then a shiver ran through the flowerbeds, and Draco heard a snarling, grinding noise, as if something large had started running down the path behind him.

Draco launched himself into a steady run. The large beast was gaining on him, but he didn't worry about that. He was sure he would vanish into a memory long before it got close.

Except that he was still running, long past the point where he would have expected to stumble into it by sheer chance, and he could hear the crunch of heavy claws and wet breath behind him.

"Potter!" he shouted.

The tumbling fall of magic answered him, darting back and forth around him, and then Draco saw a place ahead where it looked as if the gravel path had plunged into nothingness. He leaped without looking behind him, and heard a disappointed snarl as something with claws cut the air where he had disappeared.

* * *

Draco found himself in a place so small and dark that he believed for a moment it was a trap, not a memory. He turned around slowly, clutching his scythe and ready to cut through a vine or flower that the Dark Lord had sent to trip him.

Instead, the dark space bulged and rippled, and then what was obviously a door ripped open and a shrill voice shouted, "Boy, get out of there and make us breakfast!"

Draco had to leap out of the way as a much smaller version of Potter scrambled past him. He had haunted eyes, and he paused on the way to nod to Draco gloomily as if to say that he welcomed a change in his dreadful routine.

Draco paused. No other person he dealt with had ever sensed his presence in their memories, which tended to play out much like those in a Pensieve.

But it was obvious that Potter did. He kept casting nervous glances at the scythe and the knife even as he dodged the attempted pushes from a fat boy and darted between various pots and pans in the Muggle kitchen, making what looked like eggs and toast and more pieces of bacon than Draco had wanted to know existed in the world. Now and then he caught Draco's eye, and he always looked away.

This was a real memory, wasn't it? Draco prowled the edges, using his knife and scythe to probe at the cabinets and the other edges. A fake memory, altered by the patient's insanity or cast up by the presence that had possessed them, would usually be thin and porous.

But everything felt as solid as it would in a Pensieve memory. In search of further clues, Draco finally turned back and observed Potter.

He was still moving fast. He still wore the same baggy clothes that Draco vaguely remembered seeing under Potter's robes sometimes at school. He kept glancing at Draco and then away again.

No…he was sometimes looking _over_ Draco's shoulder.

Draco turned, and saw it growing down a cabinet, before it could hide itself in the shadows. It was a black vine, with flowers as red as poppies growing from it like polyps. Draco hefted the scythe and strode towards it.

The Dark Lord wasn't making up memories, as Draco had assumed he would. Instead, he was chaining Potter to what had to be some of his worst memories, though Draco wasn't sure if that was simply to torment Potter or for some other purpose.

The vine tried to crawl away, and then it reared and waved threateningly as Draco approached it. Draco struck with his scythe, but the vine sheared out of the way, and the scythe smacked into the cabinet behind it.

Potter shrieked in agony.

Draco leaped and turned around as he came down. The young Potter was on the floor, his hands over his face, blood seeping between his fingers from the scar on his brow. He looked up at Draco and shook his head pleadingly.

In the moment when Draco was debating whether he could do what he needed to do, at least if it caused Potter pain, the vine grabbed him and dragged him into another memory.

* * *

This one was familiar to Draco, who had watched it from a dozen different angles in the largest and best Pensieves the Ministry could lend to him. He braced his back against a tree and watched as blood rained from the sky.

It was the blood of Potter's victims, the ones who had tried to stand before him when they didn't know that he was possessed by a shard of the Dark Lord's soul.

And died.

They had all died.

Draco had known none of them, and so he was able to watch as Hit Wizards and a few Aurors and Ministry flunkies who had volunteered perished. They drowned in blood, and were ripped apart, and impaled on trees that came to life to stab them—they were in the Forbidden Forest—and dragged underground by living roots. The whole memory was threaded through with weeping Draco thought probably came from Potter, and laughter that certainly came from the Dark Lord.

Draco had heard that laughter, far more than once, as he was trying to struggle to sleep in the Manor.

Now, he turned about a bit until he identified where it came from. Then he struck with knife and scythe at the memory of the blood falling from the sky, ripping it apart with Legilimency, showing Potter the weaknesses and unravelings of it, and turning the Dark Lord's laughter to screams.

"This isn't you!" he called as he harvested and probed and flensed each new weakness with the edges of his mind's strength. "You would never delight in killing people like this! You would never—"

Draco gasped as a sudden, clean wind whistled around his face. It was the same sort of response that Potter had given through the flowers in the garden, but this time, there was a new thing. Draco felt the wind blow into his bones, and suddenly his arms had more strength as he wielded the weapons.

Draco had never felt something like this before, which meant he nearly let the Dark Lord's darkness go. None of the victims he helped had ever been able to fight back like this until Draco was considerably farther into the process of showing them the weakness of their enemies' domination. But there was Potter, crowding in, even pouring in his magical strength, and Draco's scythe rose like a wand and an incantation spilled forth from his lips before he thought about it.

" _Libero!_ "

The spell whistled out and tore through the memory as if it was fabric, and Draco spilled after it, into—

* * *

A trampled space of short grass and mud and pavements, where Muggle children were gathering around a building to gape up at the figure on top of it. This was a child Potter again, his hands clutching the edges of the roof and his head turned away from the delighted face of his cousin below.

Draco stumbled, his momentum stolen as he tried to figure out why this would be a bad memory, and the dark vine writhed away from him and down into the ground. Immediately it began to smoke and stir, and the children changed from staring to laughing, clapping their hands and all joining in a chant of "Freak! Freak! Freak!"

Potter shrank in on himself, and Draco understood in a flash. This must have been a time when he performed accidental magic, strong enough to get him up onto a roof. And while he hadn't been scorned like this in reality, the Dark Lord would change things until his perceptions were distorted and he believed he _had_ been.

"Potter!" Draco called again, and launched his scythe at Potter's Muggle cousin, who led the chant. He had to admit it was a guess on his part as to where the Dark Lord's power was concentrated this time, but even if he'd been wrong and only tattered an irrelevant part of the memory, there was something satisfying about making the fat Muggle image split apart.

But he had reckoned right. The dark vine came boiling out from behind the red-cheeked face again, and the child Potter lifted his head. In instants, his boiling magic was back inside Draco, churning through him and touching the Legilimency.

Draco reared back. He thought he could destroy the Dark Lord's influence now, yank apart the shard of soul speared on the end of his knife, if only—

And then the dark vine dived again, and Draco had to chase it into another memory. At least this time, Potter's magic came with him, burning all the while and beginning its own chant in a whispering voice.

 _Destroy him. Destroy him._

Draco smiled, and let Potter lead.

* * *

This time, Draco didn't know where or when they were, and he hung back a little as he let Potter's magic stalk in front of him. It was beginning to take on a visible shape, something like a great cat with stripes that flickered like smoke over a body of fire.

But that didn't make this memory make any more sense. Draco glanced around. They were deep in a cave, or at least a damp stone place with huge rivulets of water running over the walls and floor. And there was a statue of some sort off to the left, and in front of them on the floor was a plain black book, with a fang stuck through it.

The fang ripped free as Draco watched, and a laughing image of a boy, about sixteen, began to manifest out of it. He had eyes that gleamed red, and a shock rippled through Draco as he realized he was looking at the Dark Lord as a young man.

 _How would Potter know what he looked like then, though?_

"Are you trying to escape me, Harry?" The young Dark Lord chuckled and bent down to pick up the book. Some dark liquid on the floor Draco hadn't realized was ink rose up, whirled around in a cloud, and splattered back into the pages, where it began to form writing. "Imagine what will happen when you wake up with your soul in the book, condemned to darkness every day for the rest of your existence, unless _I_ feel like writing to you."

Draco glanced to the side and saw a child Potter kneeling there, shivering. There hadn't been anything wrong with him at first, but now a hole opened in his arm as Draco watched, the same size as the one that the fang had made in the book, and blood began to pour out. Potter's head drooped further and further towards the floor as Draco watched.

Then he began to thin and turn transparent.

Draco whirled around and saw Potter's magic swatting at the book in the imagined Dark Lord's hands. But its paws passed straight through. For some reason, Potter needed Draco's help to overcome this warped memory.

Draco had to smile. _Of course he does. I am the best at this, of course._

"Let me," he said, and the child on the floor as well as the teenager taunting him turned in shock. Draco stabbed with his scythe through the heart of the book and twisted it free of the teenage boy's hands as it began to bleed ink again. At the same moment, the wound in the child's arm began to heal.

The young Dark Lord shouted at Draco in Parseltongue, and Draco heard a sound of movement off to the side if from a heavy snake, the snake the fang might have come from. He didn't hesitate. He held up the book at the same moment as Potter's magic fully manifested, looking like a lion with tiger stripes.

His paw lashed out and sank into the book, crushing it.

* * *

This time, Draco wasn't in a memory at all, but only drifting blackness, blank as the space between stars.

Or the memories in a human mind.

Draco turned around, spreading his hands out. There was nothing to touch. His weapons had dissipated along with the last memory. There was nothing to see. There was nothing to hear.

Draco breathed out slowly and continued to reach as if there was, concentrating on the image of the tiger that had destroyed the Horcrux book (it had to be a Horcrux; Draco couldn't think of anything else it could be). "Harry?" he called, using the name that Potter would probably find more familiar and comforting. "You can't stay here. You'll go mad. I think you've killed off the last of the Dark Lord's influence. But we both need to go back to the light now."

No response. Draco couldn't even imagine any response, the way he had sometimes imagined hearing noises under his bed at night when he was young. He licked his lips and tried again. At least he could listen to his own voice.

"You can do it, Harry. I'm the one who came into your mind and showed you what was wrong, but your strength was what shrugged him off. Yes, you did horrible things under his influence, but everyone knows it wasn't you now. You have a life waiting."

Darkness. Silence.

"And I have a life, too," Draco added, a little irritated now. "If you won't do it for yourself because you don't think you deserve to live or something, then do it for me, because I want to live."

There was a rush all around him, like the wind, like the stalking tiger, like the wandless Apparition that had moved Potter up to the school roof as a child. And then it grabbed Draco and bore him along, and he surfaced with a gasp and his hands burning, exactly like they had carried the weight of heavy weapons.

* * *

He opened his eyes to find the chains ornamented with runes on the floor and the golden circle no longer glowing. The earplugs had been expelled from his ears by the sheer force of the magic, apparently, from the way they lay on the floor. Potter was sitting up and reaching towards him.

Of course, being Potter, he stopped before he touched Draco and instead reached down to rub his own arms. He looked down. "Thank you," he whispered.

Draco would have nodded with any of his other clients and left, after telling them about who would be here shortly to really reassure them. But he'd never had any client help him to do his job before. He put his hand on Potter's arm.

Potter's eyes shot to him. They were pure green now, without a trace of red.

"You're welcome," Draco said. "And you as well, for what you did."

Potter blinked and blinked. He looked so tired that Draco winced. This moment balanced on a delicate edge. It would be easy—at least for Potter, probably—to forget about what they had shared to free his mind and go on his own way.

But it wasn't easy for Draco. So he didn't blink or stare or frown or turn away, and finally Potter's hand touched his and then curled around it.

"Where do we go from here?" Potter said.

"Well. For one thing, out of the Ministry."

Potter gave a soft, exhausted laugh, and stood up shakily. Draco had to help him off the table, and get used to the shape of Potter in his arms as he limped towards the door, leaning on Draco.

But that was all right. It would be easy to get used to.

After all, he already knew the shape of Potter's mind.

 **The End.**


End file.
